Setting Aside a Scholarly Get-Together, for the Planet’s Sake

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Laurie Zoloth of Northwestern, president of the American Academy of Religion.CreditSeth Joel

By Mark Oppenheimer

Dec. 5, 2014

SAN DIEGO — If the bioethicist Laurie Zoloth, the president of the American Academy of Religion, has her way, she’ll be remembered as the woman who canceled her organization’s conference, which every year attracts a city’s worth of religion scholars.

Two weeks ago, at her organization’s gathering, which is held jointly with the Society for Biblical Literature and this year drew 9,900 scholars, Dr. Zoloth used her presidential address to call on her colleagues to plan a sabbatical year, a year in which they would cancel their conference. In her vision, they would all refrain from flying across the country, saving money and carbon. It could be a year, Dr. Zoloth argued, in which they would sacrifice each other’s company for the sake of the environment, and instead would turn toward their neighborhoods and hometowns.

“We could create an A.A.R. Sabbatical Year,” she told the crowd in a ballroom at the San Diego Convention Center. “We could choose to not meet at a huge annual meeting in which we take over a city. Every year, each participant going to the meeting uses a quantum of carbon that is more than considerable. Air travel, staying in hotels, all of this creates a way of living on the earth that is carbon intensive. It could be otherwise.”

And they could use the traditional days of the conference, always held the weekend before Thanksgiving, to offer talks to “the poor, in local high schools, community colleges, or the prison, the hospital, the military base, the church, mosque, synagogue or temple.” They could work at planting an orchard, or a garden, or serving food to the poor. “What if we turned to our neighbor — the woman who cleans the toilets, the man who sweeps the sidewalks — and included them in the university to which we are responsible?”

The audacious suggestion was the centerpiece of this year’s conference theme — fighting climate change. In 2011, Dr. Zoloth, who teaches at Northwestern University, was elected vice president of the American Academy of Religion, the world’s largest association of religion scholars, for the following year, 2012. Scholars work at a 40-years-in-the-desert pace, according to which the vice president becomes president-elect the next year, then ascends to the presidency a year later. So Dr. Zoloth had three years to plan her presidential year.

Almost immediately, she knew that she wanted to focus on climate change. Because in her own field, bioethics, she frequently talks with scientists, she was aware that religion scholars were lagging in their attention to climate change.

“I decided it was the core moral issue of our time,” Dr. Zoloth said on Nov. 22, the day before her big speech. “And I had one chance to really say I don’t know the answer — we don’t know the answer, and we’re faced with this. The scientists on my campus are frantic about this science. Every scientific panel I went to was filled with incredibly anxious scientists.” And they kept asking about her religion colleagues: What are you doing?

So as she planned ahead for the 2014 conference, she encouraged the program chairmen, who coordinate the hundreds of small panels that make up the main business of the conference, to seek out papers that dealt with the environment and climate change. She succeeded; in her estimate, nearly a third of this year’s papers somehow discussed the environment, ecology or related issues, like animal rights.

So attendees could have heard Cynthia Bond, of Claremont Graduate University, in California, discuss “Strategic Essentialism as a Tactical Approach to an Ecofeminist Epistemology.” Or Steven Heine, of Florida International University, speak on “The Staying Power of the Zen Buddhist Oxherding Pictures.” Or Donna L. Seamone, of Acadia University, in Nova Scotia, deliver her paper " ‘The Path Has a Mind of Its Own’: Eco-Agri-Pilgrimage to the Corn Maze Performance — an Exercise of Cross-Species Sociality.”

Not all of the presentations were so esoteric. In a riveting session, Robert P. Jones, of the Public Religion Research Institute, announced the findings of a new survey, conducted jointly with the American Academy of Religion, about how climate change attitudes vary by religious belief. Some of the findings were not surprising — for example, white evangelical Protestants are most resistant to the findings of climate science, and they are “much more likely to attribute the severity of recent natural disasters to the biblical ‘end times’ than to climate change.”

But other findings were unexpected. Hispanic Catholics were more likely to be “very concerned” about climate change (43 percent of them) than any other group profiled, including Jews, black Protestants or the unaffiliated. One scholar at the conference, Bernard Zaleha of the University of California, Santa Cruz, later offered a theory. “It may be because they still have relatives in the global south, where the effects of climate change are already being felt,” Mr. Zaleha said in an interview.

Dr. Zoloth didn’t win all the victories she sought. A vegetarian, she was unable to persuade her fellow organizers to keep the conference catering meat-free. When asked why others resisted, she shook her head and said, “I don’t know. They just couldn’t imagine it.”

But she has at least introduced to her fellow academy members, most of them not Jewish, the biblical concept of shmita. That is the Jewish theological term for the year, out of every seven, when, in the words of Dr. Zoloth’s speech, “all agricultural work stops, the fields are left fallow, and every living creature, animal, and person can eat from the field and the vineyard and the wide open world, when the boundaries of ownership and possession are broken so that the poor can take what they need, when all debts are released.”

We are currently in a shmita year, as it happens. The next one is 2021. That’s the year, Dr. Zoloth hopes, when the organization she currently leads will cease its conferencing labors and stay home. Such an action would create problems, not least for graduate students who interview for jobs at the conference. But there’s always Skype — and besides, time is short.

“Of course it will be hard,” Dr. Zoloth told her audience, “and you might be thinking now how hard, how costly, how, as they say, inconvenient. But we have seven years to figure out the details, and you are a very, very clever group of scholars.”

mark.e.oppenheimer@gmail
.com; twitter: @markopp1

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Setting Aside a Scholarly Get-Together, for the Planet’s Sake. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe